Metered by our own beating hearts..

Resident Alien. Part 18.

Psychogeography. Part 5.

“On Saturday evenings I have had the custom, after taking my opium, of wandering quite far, without worrying about the route or the distance in search of an occult Northwest Passage, allowing one to cross London unhampered”. — Thomas de Quincey, Confessions Of An English Opium-Eater, 1822.

In this world where everything seems like it must have a purpose from the onset, to truly be able to drift through a city on foot, without notion or direction, is actually a very difficult endeavor to undertake. Psychogeography, as a practice, has been my own personal revolt against such purpose and Guy Debord’s dérive has been the technique I have used to achieve it. 

Whether a purpose be self imposed or from an outside agent, the dérive offers the photographer an opportunity to side-step the ex-clusive thinking of purpose and to instead indulge every distraction from it. By surrendering one’s own personal guidance systems (or algorithms) in favor of chance encounters and unexpected events is to invite the possibility of also making new and authentic work and to discover alternative approaches to connecting with our own environment.

It's true that to dérive is actually not just difficult to accomplish psychologically, but it is also difficult (and sometimes just not possible) to navigate an urban environment on foot these days. In many modern cities the pedestrian has taken second place to the automobile and walking in such areas can not only be considered dangerous, but also, on occasion, illegal too. 

As a result the urban walker has been marginalized by the city planners into using officially designated public footpaths which offer the full spectrum hamster-wheel circuit tours of all The Spectacles highlights. The wild and well trodden wasteland game trails made by the local humans have been intersected by chain-link fences with no trespassing signs attached to them. These inter-zones are now being reclaimed by their native scrub of dock leaf, stingy nettle and graffiti and the wait for future developments can be measured in the height of their growth. 

As a photographer I have discovered by engaging in this practice of the dérive is a purpose will inevitably surface from the very act of the dérive itself. I believe, by walking through a space with a camera, by simply following light or letting one photograph inform the next, new ideas and alignments between our experiences and encounters along the way will start to form their own connections. 

As these seemingly disparate elements begin to develop relationships, first between one another and then with ourselves, I have found that the impulse to make a photograph is actually my own emotional response to it, like a dialogue. It is this consciously observed emotional awareness that is key to psychogeography as a practice and also to myself as a photographer.

The dérive engages the photographer in a stream of consciousness narrative where memory (and photography) become informed by the passing of time through a space. It is really a picaresque journey where our photographs are metered by the rhythm of walking and by our own beating hearts. In this way the dérive could also be considered a meditation by way of it keeping us present and aware of our surroundings. 

If we happen to venture out on a dérive with our camera but return without making an interesting photo, this time is not to be thought of as lost because we have spent that time engaged in the rigorous practice of active observation, not just of our environment, but also how our perception has interacted with it. Any successful photographs made during a dérive are, in this way, to be regarded as psychic breakthroughs. They are like grounding charges that have built up over a period of continued conscious attention and then earthed by the tripping of the shutter. 

The drifting psychogeographer will also discover that some places seem to accumulate a sort of gravity around them and are points of concentrated psychic energy. These are what photographer Joel Meyerowitz calls “The Zen Bell” - that which alerts the self to our own awareness and results in the lifting of our camera. These places can take the form of repeated symbols within the environment, cultural or historical markers, the locations of past-life events, or even present day poltergeist activity. The attuned landscape photographer will feel this energy most strongly and you will likely hear the sound of their tripod legs being extended as phantom civil war musket fire begins to crackle inside their heads.

Some places are in continuous transition as they clatter down through the decades, supported by scaffolding with its population in a state of perpetual anxiety. Other places have remained stable across time and have become rooted in tradition as their gargoyles are slowly choked by ivy. Other spaces have maintained their identity for a long time (either culturally or as a utility) but have since undergone some form of swift and radical new development, leaving its locals out in the cold. 

This disembodied sense of loss can be felt as we walk through these spaces and it can be seen in the faces of those that pass us on the street and it will also show up in the photographs that we make there. This public grief for a place that is gone but still yet to become, is a hard one for a community (and us) to shake and these ghosts will follow us home, trailing behind us at the end of the day, jumping from shadow to shadow, until finally taking their leave, later, through our dreams. 

The dérive offers a chance for us to approach these environments with our uncertainty intact and with a purpose that is yet to be determined. By inviting the creative free association of photography with us on a dérive, we are also granted a rare opportunity to gain an insight into the secret arcane logic of our own image making. Whether it be for the first time or in the re-discovery of a place that is already familiar, by leaving a trail of photographs behind us we will begin to map these spaces properly, from the ground up and from the inside out..

Psychogeography has been central to my photography for over a decade. It forms the backbone of my Resident Alien project (which all these photographs here are part of) and it sits at the heart of the work I am presently engaged in. With an enthusiasm for chance and for what could be argued as a foolhardy desire for getting (purpose-fully) lost, I have found myself traveling roads I would have otherwise avoided, lived a life I could never have predicted and seen an America that I could not have imagined. It is in this way the dérive maintains its original position as a form of personal protest, holding firm its demonstration against the established order of The Spectacle with a radical insurrection of the self.